Success Secret: Social Listening

What makes some brands better at social media than others? At least part of the answer is they listen. They take time to understand what their audience cares about, what others are saying, and what’s having an impact.

Social listening gives you access to what people are saying about your brand, industry, or competitors online. Taking the time to listen offers the most authentic and unbiased insights you can get as a business.

Social Listening Tools Make the Task Easy

Listening should be part of your plan. Make it easier by using a tool that will help you to discover the conversations you care about.

Mention

Mention is a social media and web monitoring tool. Its focus is on real-time search of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and websites. Results are from the last 24 hours.

Mention lets you discover Twitter and Instagram influencers by running quick keyword searches. The tool then lets you add influencers of your choice to lists that can be exported.

Mention comes with pre-built reports and you can build your own custom reports.

There is a free trial period. Plans start at $29/mo.

Awario

Awario is a relatively new tool with plans starting at $29/mo. You monitor mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and websites. It supports Boolean queries for the less obvious use cases.

A social selling tool, called Leads, is available as a free add-on to all users. The tool uses predictive insights to find people who’re asking for recommendations about a product like yours or looking for an alternative to your competitors.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse offers scheduling and monitoring of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The tool will find @mentions of accounts you connect, as well as comments on your social media posts, plus allow you to search for keywords of your choice across Twitter. The tool also lets you identify influencers within your social media audience and assign conversations to your team in a mouse click. Agorapulse doesn’t offer web monitoring. It’s a great choice if you’re mainly interested in social mentions. Agorapulse has a free trial. Paid plans start at $49/mo.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is one of the most powerful (and expensive) social listening tools for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Sina Weibo, VK, QQ and websites. In addition to listening, Brandwatch offers image recognition, demographic data about your audience, trending topics in your niche, API access, and dashboards that can be exported into customizable PowerPoint presentations.

Brandwatch also has its own data visualization platform called Vizia. The tool lets you visualize your Brandwatch data, plus combine it with insights from Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, and Hootsuite.